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Front Porch: Long ago, when we used real phonesÊ...

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published May 19, 2006

I spent much of yesterday on the telephone. Some for pleasure, mostly for business, on a cell phone that is both compact and silver and sports a bejeweled pink butterfly ring tucked over the antenna.

For years I have thought cell phones were the greatest, a way to multitask while doing five other things at once. But after losing service three times in a row yesterday while chatting with my sister, I turned the phone off in frustration.

It made me think about what I was doing.

There was a time, not so very long ago before cell phones became so ubiquitous, when the telephone was a fixture in the home.

It usually held a prominent place either in the den or living room on a table next to the sofa - a pad and pencil beside it for taking messages. Some homes featured an official phone or "gossip" bench, usually a sweet and feminine confection, built for a woman, her phone and phone books.

Both of my grandmothers had rotary wall phones in their kitchens: big, rangy devices meant to be seen and heard no matter where you stood, with rings loud and trilling and no-nonsense as fire alarms.

My Florida grandmother's phone was black and utilitarian, perfect for ringing up the butcher or calling a prescription in to the pharmacist at her Miami Beach drugstore.

My Chicago grandmother's phone was a little livelier: bright sunflower yellow with a long curlicue cord that stretched all the way to the cushioned kitchen banquette.

There, she could sit and talk to my mother or her sister, my Great Aunt Mabel, who worked behind the candy counter at Marshall Field's. Best friends for life, the two sisters talked every day - sometimes a couple of times a day - on the big yellow phone.

There were other phones in my Chicago grandmother's house, too. One at her writing desk, and another black rotary phone on a table on the second-floor landing: a comfortable, upholstered chair next to it for anyone who wished to make a telephone call.

In those days, the phone commanded a prominent place in the home. You couldn't take it with you in the car or to the grocery store or to the hair salon. And when you sat down to call someone, the act of dialing and waiting for the rotary dial to spin through its clunky gyrations meant you had to sit still for awhile.

Telephones looked different, too. They came in a handful of varieties depending on the age, taste and gender of the owner.

There were the kind of phones you saw in old movies, sort of French provincial, with ornate, heavy receivers and cradles that looked like they belonged next to the perfume bottles on a movie star's mirrored dressing table.

In my generation, sleek princess phones were all the rage - the kind of phones I still imagine the Brady Bunch girls or Barbie talking on. I remember Snoopy phones, even ultra-modern '70s phones shaped like the letter O and available in a rainbow of bright colors, like banana yellow.

Even when I was too small for a bicycle, I owned a telephone, a powder-pink, plastic princess phone that held the place of honor on the miniature table where I entertained my neighborhood girlfriends with tea in doll-size cups.

I remember one afternoon spent taking turns chattering on the phone - it didn't work except when we pretended it did - practicing our best phone manners, carrying on conversations with the air.

Recently, while reporting a story at a historic home in Tampa, the homeowners - both in their early 40s - took me out to the detached garage behind the house.

They pointed out something they thought was of particular interest: a black rotary wall phone, still working, that had belonged to the home's previous elderly owner.

Since this couple and I were all roughly the same age, we were fascinated by this bygone phone, this artifact - like men's hats - from the age of civility. I picked up the receiver and cradled it against my ear and listened to the hollow drone of the dial tone as if it were a lullaby.

I wondered what would happen if I dialed my grandmothers' old phone numbers - forever engraved in my memory. Though they passed away years ago, would this phone get me through to them wherever they were?

Imagine that, I said, a black rotary phone that still worked.

Imagine.

A few minutes letter I was back in my car, heading for home, dutifully checking my voice mail messages on my tiny silver cell phone with its pink butterfly jewel.

A nice convenience. but I would never have thought of calling my grandmothers on it.

They would have wanted me to sit down on my living room sofa and really talk to them for a while.

On a real phone.

[Last modified May 18, 2006, 12:27:17]